Monster Tale Review

Be sure to check out this charming adventure before you retire your aging DS.

One of the best parts of owning a successful console is that erratic trickle of easily overlooked gems you see at the very tail end of its life. Games like Drill Dozer, Arc the Lad Collection, and Persona 4, for example: latecomers whose task was to turn over the chairs, switch off the lights, and send home the lonely stragglers determined to see those systems through to the end. Now the DS can lay claim to its own swan song, too, thanks to DreamRift's Monster Tale.

Monster Tale may or may not be the last interesting DS game we'll ever see in the U.S. -- maybe E3 2011 will surprise us! -- but there's no question that it's worth playing. A follow-up of sorts to 2009's platform/puzzler Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, Monster Tale is one part portable Castlevania, one part Pokémon. It's a somewhat non-linear adventure where you collect different powers to unlock previously inaccessible areas, very much in the vein of the recent Shantae: Risky's Revenge. What sets it apart from its peers is that your little heroine, Ellie, is only one half of the power-up equation. The other half -- the lion's share, really -- is invested in her companion, Chomp, the game's eponymous monster.

Ellie gains a few obligatory power-ups in the course of her quest (melee attacks, energy bullets, a Mega Man X-style wall jump), but most of the game's character development comes in the form of Chomp. For starters, only Chomp gains experience and levels up by defeating enemies. As he fights and collects enemy drops, he evolves into different forms and learns new skills. Despite the fact that Ellie is the character you control directly, Chomp is the one that develops and grows. He's a bit like the familiar cards you could collect in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, except far more versatile, and not entirely invulnerable.

Chomp's power and usefulness are balanced by his vulnerability. The actions he performs while in combat are deducted from his energy meter, and once that's depleted he's briefly taken out of the action to recover. You can head off this downtime by sending him onto the lower screen before he runs out of steam, which acts as a sort of safe haven where his energy replenishes -- and it charges up more quickly when he's conscious, so it behooves players to take him out of the action voluntarily from time to time. Eventually, the game actively forces your hand by making interesting use of the dual-screen setup: sending threats to the bottom screen and forcing you to respond by taking Chomp out of the main action to deal with these distractions.

This is the point where Monster Tale begins to tip its hand to its lineage; like Henry Hatsworth, the game's difficulty ramps up about midway through and eventually becomes quite difficult. Unlike the earlier game, though, Monster Tale is presented as a kids' game, with cute graphics and saccharine dialogue. The disconnect between its kindergarten presentation and its hardcore difficulty level (not to mention the moderately complex and subtle monster-raising mechanics) is arguably Monster Tale's biggest flaw. One could speculate that the sugary-sweet aesthetics of the game are a sort of desperate Trojan horse to get a DS game greenlighted in this day and age, a necessary evil of focus testing, or whatever. It's not an irredeemable flaw by any means, just a whiff of false advertising.

Click the image above to check out all Monster Tale screens.

Assuming you know what you're getting into -- namely, a meaty and occasionally tough action platformer in the 16-bit vein -- there's a lot to love about Monster Tale. It's brimming with detail; the monster evolution mechanics offer plenty of customization and variety; and all in all it's a wonderful homage to the classic games that clearly inspired it. The music in the starting section is a pitch-perfect pastiche of a Michiru Yamane Castlevania soundtrack's opening area tune, and the adventure even begins with a game design reference to the collecting the Maru-Mari in the original Metroid. Monster Tale's creators are clearly folks whose love for the classics is after my own heart, but instead of merely writing about how great non-linear platformers are, they went and created their own worthy addition to the genre.

Late life-cycle arrivals like Monster Tale -- Kirby's Adventure and the original Shantae, for example -- have a tendency to go overlooked in their time. Monster Tale is absolutely worthy to stand aside those classics. Hopefully, though, gamers will catch on to its quality before it becomes a regrettably overlooked gem of the past.

Comments (23)

This game is great!

I loved Hatsworth but I took some downtime before trying this one out. Hopefully the difficulty will ramp up like jparish said because so far it is kind of easy. I don't understand why people don't like when a game gets hard. I liked that about Hatsworth.

This looks interesting.

I love my DS. My DS is literally my most coveted handheld console I own. The games like this that come out of nowhere and shock people into playing them and enjoying the hell out of them are my favorite.

Same thinking as you!

I just bought it and decided to see how well the game was rated as I ploughed thru it for a few days. Long story short, I really like! It's no Pokemon but I played a few Megaman games way back when and I feel like this is the type of format that would have complimented Digimon!

yuh!

Shmenry Shmatsworth

Although I can appreciate why Henry Hatsworth was supposed to be so great I thought it was a little too difficult and got repetitive quickly. This does look interesting however and getting 3 stars in every pilot wings mission isnt proving to be too difficult...

Loving it...

Really really like it. I think it's absolutely one of the best original DS games ever released. I don't especially understand the complaints against it having cute graphics though. Why do we have to segregate games based on some kind of "difficulty wagered against colour palette" ratio?

Why are games with actual meat on their bones automatically required to be extremely drab and edgy? Is Nintendo the only company allowed to make games with both colors and depth now? "Preschool presentation" doesn't seem to prevent adults from obsessing over Mario, Sonic, and Pokemon...

It's not a desperate Trojan horse. The developers just had the balls to make something that's actually different and creative rather than making yet another game about ogrish gritty realistic bald men or gothic bondage-gear wearing anime people.

If the game was affected by a "necessary evil of focus testing," the main character would have been an average joe male protagonist with a gun (or an ice queen with watermelon sized elastic tits wearing little other than some black lingerie), the monster would have been some sort of overdrawn WoW looking dragon or demon, and everything would have been darker and more standard. It probably would have looked a lot like Darksiders.

@jparish

Posted: Apr 03, 2011 12:00AM PST by AdvancedCaveman
You know what, you've got me there. I haven't looked at a DS release schedule for the past couple of years because there's been almost nothing but activity software targeted at little girls (or girlz as Ubisoft probably calls them) coming out for the DS.

Maybe the story is targeted to kids, but there's more thought put into it than what you usually see out of games. The protagonist here is a female character that's neither the usual action girl/tomboy trope who must behave like a man in order to deal with adversity, nor the sort of patronizing characterize seen in Super Princess Peach. There's a sort of How to Train Your Dragon type of story going on with the relationship between the protagonist and the monster as well.

It doesn't really do much with it (and I guess it doesn't need to); there's no build up between these 2 characters. They're instant friends and there's no gradual buildup towards a friendship. Its a kiddie story but there's a little more thought and character put into it than a lot of games I see these days, particularly on the DS. I don't care who something is targeted at, its interesting if there's some genuine sincerity and uniqueness to it.

Less is more but:

The back and forth would have been a great dialogue about feminism, gender identity, maturity and even the nature of what sells and what doesn't sell. . . yet the retort was to think cynically of what Mr. Parish has said and to oversimplify the critique which was overall pretty accurate to the game.

I'm roughly four hours in and I barely use my monster except for the functions that it is meant to do (turn knobs, be used like a bouncy thing). Otherwise I use the girl for everything. I feel it was a homage to Samus, and The Castlevanian characters and Megaman. She is one hell of a fighter and I feel like the monster component could have used been set up differently - I really don't like how so many commands are sequenced and forces the monster to do its own thing.

The story feels short but the overall B+ feels a little more than I would have given it. I agree completely that the cutesy appearance mislead me for months to not buy this game. Yet I know why it isn't rammed down my throat as it is great, but not great enough to call it an instant classic.

Finally.

Oh but I beg to differ Parish!

In fact, I'd say that hardcore difficult games are perfect for children. When I was a kid I was flying through Ghosts and Goblins (or whatever that game was called), Megaman 2, Contra, god so much shit that I can't even look at anymore because the thought of trying to beat them legitimately makes me want to throw up.

See, kids actually have the time and persistence to master these games assuming they ignore their homework (and my personal experience tells me that they will).

hells yeah

Awesome

I really enjoyed Henry Hatsworth and I'm excited for this game. I'm in if it's as difficult as Henty was, and the platform/exploration is interesting as well as the monster raising aspect. This might be the last great game on the DS and the last DS game I purchase. Great review btw.